Political novice wins Slovak presidency

Slovaks have chosen a previously little-known businessman, Andrej Kiska, as their president rather than Robert Fico, the country’s serving prime minister.

The scale of Kiska’s victory was overwhelming, underscoring just how much Fico miscalculated when, in December, he decided to stand. Fico’s entry into the race transformed a battle for figurehead position into what became widely viewed as a referendum on Fico. Although Fico will remain prime minister, the newspaper Sme suggested that Fico’s defeat is one from which he will never fully recover and marks the beginning of the end of his dominance of Slovak politics.

Fico had begun his campaign with a lead of around 20 percentage points over a crowded field, and with two recent decisive electoral victories to his name. In 2012, he became prime minister for the second time, forming the first single-party government since Slovakia gained statehood in 1993, and last year his centre-left party, Smer, won six of eight gubernatorial races.

However, by the first round of the elections, on 15 March, Kiska had narrowed the gap to four points and he emerged from yesterday’s run-off with a winning margin of almost 19 percentage points. He secured 59.4% of the vote, winning also in Hungarian-populated areas, while Fico’s tally was 40.6%. In the first round, Fico won 28.0% and Kiska 24.0%.

After the first round, analysts suggested that the low turnout – 43.4% – had depressed Fico’s results, and Fico appears to have calculated on mobilising his core electorate, left-wing voters outside the large urban centres. That mobilisation failed to boost turnout substantially – 50.5% of voters went to the polling stations yesterday – and Fico’s final figure was lower than his party had won in the elections in 2012.

Fico’s core message, repeated frequently in the final presidential debate on Wednesday (26 March), was that Kiska was an unknown quantity. Kiska, 51, is a self-made millionaire who, after a brief stint doing manual work in the US in the early 1990s and after an unsuccessful period trading jewellery, made his money by offering Slovaks credit. In 2006, he established a cancer charity.

During the campaign, Fico also accused Kiska of “[using] poverty to enrich himself”, suggested he had links to the Scientologists, partly because his autobiography was published by a company owned by the leading Slovak scientologists, and unearthed the results of an inspection of Kiska’s businesses, which Fico said had resulted in fines for unfair business practices.

Fico also secured the backing of the three previous Slovak presidents – Ivan Gašparovič, Rudolf Schuster and Michal Kováč – and the current Czech president, Miloš Zeman, had also voiced his support. In recent weeks, Fico had reached out to Catholics, primarily by supporting a definition of marriage in the constitution as the union of a man and woman, and sought to allay some concerns among factory workers by publicly opposing the imposition of economic sanctions on Russia after its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

Hospodárske noviny, a daily, said that Kiska, who will take up his new office in mid-June, had mastered Fico’s own weaponry – content-free speechifying – while observers characterised Kiska’s performance as reliant on repetition and on allusions to values. As well as presenting his personal story as a tale of an ordinary man made good, Kiska sought primarily to capitalise on concerns about Smer’s domination of the political scene. However, in the presidential debates and on the campaign trail, he did not seize on a statement made by Fico on 20 March that “the president will soon become a much more important figure than the prime minister is today”. Fico did not elaborate, immediately left a small meeting with journalists after making the comment, and his statement generated few headlines and debate. However, his statement stoked speculation among analysts that Fico had plans to change the constitution.

Erik Láštic of Bratislava’s Comenius University said yesterday that the hardest question that Fico had faced throughout the campaign, and which he had failed to answer convincingly, was why exactly he wanted to leave an executive position for a role as constitutional figurehead.

During the campaign, Fico said that he could leave politics if he did not win. Commentators so far, though, see little immediate prospect of that happening. Martin Slosiarik of the market-research company Focus also predicted that the defeat would have little immediate impact on Smer’s fortunes, as it dominates the left in Slovakia and the right is weak and highly fragmented. The first test will come at the European Parliament elections in late May. Five of Slovakia’s 12 MEPs are members of Smer, which was founded by Fico in 1999.

The presidential elections have already had one effect on party politics, with the third-placed candidate, Radoslav Procházka, beginning to consider setting up his own party. A former Christian Democrat well known for his substantive and rhetorically highly effective parliamentary speeches, he ran as an independent and doubled his support in the last weeks before the first round.

Láštic suggested that, in an attempt to shore up its position, Smer may increasingly look to forge a relationship with the Christian Democrats.